Tim Brown is the owner of Hook Agency, and strategic marketer focused primarily on driving traffic and leads for small businesses and construction companies.

Quick Overview

Create headlines that grab people’s attention and use words that promise some kind of instant gratification, or significant payoff.

Give them a special offer in the headline or description. 30% off this month only, Free Consultation, etc. will help the searcher recognize what kind of opportunity they have in front of them.

Grab their click by asking for action. “Get started now” at the end of your description or similar can give you a surprisingly nice boost.

You want people to come to your website from search engines, but first you have to get them to click the link in the search results. That not only means making your site show up higher with SEO, but making your headline and description enticing enough to attract people’s clicks.

Google’s algorithm takes into consideration click-through rate as part of figuring whether it served you the right things. If it serves up a particular result over and over again and people don’t click into it – it factors that in as not serving the right thing up and changes up the order for the next time.

This is an over-simplification – but the principle of getting more people to click your result (and fulfilling the reason that they clicked) is sound. We’ll get more into why you need to fulfill their need at the end of how to implement these 3 easy hacks for how to improve CTR for SEO.

1. How to create headlines that grab people’s attention

You want to use words that incite a kind of immediate reaction in people’s gut. Things like “Free”, “Now”, numbers, special characters, the current year… Go even more extreme “Hacks” like the title of this post, “Soul-crushingly”, “Pure joy”, “Mind-numbingly simple”, “Crazy new tactics”, “The one secret”.

Yes… you could sound spammy somewhat quickly – so measure this with the reality of your post – or better yet, do everything in your power to push your post into the territory your title alludes to. Write your title first! Make it really great and ready to capture the audience and then create the page to exceed the expectations of people that would click that post.

2. How to insert a special offer into your page’s title and description

You are likely already offering some kind of incentive on your site to get people to contact you or to buy. Either your customer service is super great, you have better deals, or you offer a free estimate or similar. Now… you just need to find a way to throw that in your title, or right before the end of your description.

If you have less offerings – like 3 packages or a couple key products you could update each month for the current promotion. Example: 20% off until the end of January.

Get a Free Instant SEO Audit

3. How to ask for action and get them to the next step.

You don’t have to be pushy – if you gave them the offer in number 3, then just invite them to get started. ‘Get started today’ is not a bad option, but you could say anything like ‘check out our offers’ if you just want to get them into the page.

With some niches it will be better to take the soft sell approach – and with others you might want to be more aggressive. Guage the ideal demographic and what you’d guess they prefer.

Once you get them there – give them a payoff, so they stay on the page: Google factors in “dwell time” as a ranking factor

Dwell time = time the person spent on your site without bouncing back to the search results page. If you bounce back, Google will factor that you didn’t find what you were looking for – so you have to keep people on the page by really inviting them to stay and play on your site.

My tactic – like the beginning of this post, is to hook people with a big visual payoff and then extrapolate on that information so that people can get a more full robust answer if they dive in.